The present invention relates to an IC card and a card adapter, and particularly to a technique of making a specific IC card usable as IC cards having different shapes, different number of terminals (external terminals), and different properties.
A memory card as small as a postage stamp, with an electrically writable/erasable nonvolatile memory called flash EEPROM (Electrically Erasable Programmable Read Only Memory) being built in, is in course of development.
Small memory cards have already been commercialized as storage mediums of small electronic appliances such as digital cameras and portable telephone units.
These memory cards are complicated in their standards (external dimensions, number of pins, function, etc.), and some memory card standards are incompatible with each other. FIG. 46 is a table of some standards of small memory cards, listing the development companies, product names and external dimensions of memory cards.
Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. Hei7 (1995)-141114 discloses a technique, in which a memory card 3a is set in a card adapter 30 and the adapter 30 is put into the memory card slot 21 of an information handling appliance 22 so that serial data transmission is established between the memory card 3a and the appliance 22: (refer to the abstract and FIG. 10 of the patent publication).
Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 2001-307801 discloses a connector of memory card which has an inseparable upper and lower sections formed of resin constituting an SD card connector 10 to be coupled with an SD card 50 and a SIM card connector 20 to be coupled with a SIM card 60: (refer to the abstract and FIG. 2 of the patent publication).